Amarok 2.2.90 Most Irritating Bug #228014: File metadata not displayed If File Is Not Present In Collection

Well it’s no secret that I’m a music fan and love to keep my music organized, and neatly tagged. ( Well, if you didn’t – now you do ). I’d posted quite sometime ago on how to keep your music well tagged and organized, so there’s pretty much no way that my files wouldn’t be tagged.

Of course, there exceptions here and there but majority are tagged. So I was rather surpised today when Amarok , during playback wasn’t showing any metadata. To verify – I installed id3v2, a CLI tool to view/edit ID3 tags for mp3 files using zypper and – guess what- it showed the meta data correctly.

ID3 tag - gone!

I tried this for few more songs so that I can reproduce this, and confident of that, fired up the bug report tool and filed in a bug for the same. In few hours, I got an email notification about change in status of the bug. Here’s what Myriam asked me:

Are those tracks in the collection? You might want to try a full collection
rescan and restart Amarok to see if it changes.

On checking, – the tracks had mysteriously disappeared from my collection. I rescanned the collection, still it showed nothing. Quit Amarok, restarted, and lo, it was there :|
So the bug – if the tracks aren’t in collection, then the meta data for them is not read / skipped. Why ? I don’t know. Perhaps the developersthought,

hey the track isn’t in collection, so lets not parse the meta data and we’ll skip gathering the stats.

.

Note: This is what *I* think, I’m nowhere implying that this is by design of Amarok.

It’ll be interesting to see how the bug gets tracked and what happens to it. Will keep updating it.

(PS: If you’re wondering why its irritating, well, without the metadata the last.fm scrobbler won’t pick up the song and scrobble the play. Maybe you think its stupid, but *meh*).